I hope this is according to your taste of coloful trips 

I also have to say, I like this dark rough lighting of your scenes.

I am really sorry for this, because I can see that a lot of work went into this project so war, but I think you will not get any positive feedback for your game here at all (my personal point of view). There can be said a lot more, but I will just go though your "Highlights". They all sound to me like marketing crap to me, but lets get started.

   A fully immersive JRPG experience with a rich storyline, great graphics, and an immersive original soundtrack

It is not on you to decide whether something you made  is immersive or not. This is entirely the player who does it.

   Coming to PC via Steam once funded (we have already been Greenlit by the community!)
    3D models and original assets come together with stylized and gorgeous hand-drawn 2D backgrounds

"gorgeous"? Really? How about you let me decide if I like it or not.

   Turn-based combat and tactical war scenes that will test not only your skill but also your wits and keep you on your toes

I am pretty sure that most players will be sitting when they play it  . But seriously, again you do not decide if I think something is hard for me or not.

   Recruit NPCs to revamp your Headquarters

Ok, when that one of your highlights, I don't want to know what happens during the boring parts of the game.

   Fully rendered 3D cinematics

I am not sure if "rendered 3D cinematics" are something worth mentioning anymore at all. Honestly we have high quality tools like blender for free for everybody. This is nothing special anymore at all.


PS:

This is not the worst case I've seen, but sometimes it feels like the images to show to the public have been chosen wisely to not show gameplay, because gameplay sucks. All I see is a androgynous teenager with spiky hair trying to look cool while swinging the sword. But I do like one of the images though. The one under the headline "DEPLOY YOUR TROOPS TO WAR", this one actually shows me a little bit about what I am actually doing in the game.

In case you care these are my emotions to your marketing:

 

@Thaumaturge the colors do not cycle, but the heights are constantly changing and wobbling around. The color is inferred from the height, so the colors are also not really constant. And of course it is infinite. If you want to you can try it out, it is all open source and just an example of my in development game/renderer creation tool that does not yet have a proper name. But you would be on your own to compile it. It's written in a not so popular programming language called Nim.

The earlier you start making games, the better you can become in making games. You will learn as you actually make the games. Only make games, that you are sure you can finish. Don't plan big projects, unless you already finished projects in a similar size. A game needs to be fun from the beginning. When you plan is, that your game will be fun eventually after you have spent a ton of work on it, it is very likely, that you will loose interest in working on the project at all, or even start hating working on that project. It is very important, that your process of making the game itself is a lot of fun, otherwise you will just stop making it. Making games is not a sprint it is a marathon.

@blacktowerbasement: I really like your art style, but I think tha talking mountains could blend in better to appear to be rocks. Even when they are not moving they just look like humans in stone color

There are good reasons not to use Unity. My personal reasons number one reason next to a lot more is this one: With unity I can't use Linux as my development platform. With that limitation you can't have any developer in your team who got comfortable developing on Linux (like me).

And then I also think it is very valuable to go the process, and develop an engine on your own to actually get the knowledge how an engine works and which parts are the hard parts.

Personally I build my own rendering framework on SDL and OpenGL to do my rendering. But There is a lot of work involved to get OpenGL into something that can be used productively. But I also think that there is a lot of value when you learn how to develop your own tools, that do what you want to do and better than any of the shelf solution.

Does it feature lovers in a dangerous spacetime like multiplayer? Since I played that game, I so want wore of it. And can you make a free demo of your game?

Are front page articles coming back at some point in time? I have the impression they are somewhat dead, or there is almost nothing coming anymore.

maybe something like this http://www.aluehn.de/ would be nice. It looks so trashy yet charming.

@blinkok

thank you for the link, but I am not looking for assets. I need to have influence on what I get.

the problem is, that I always search too long and nothing is really good. And when I have something and need something more, then I am lost, because it is impossible to find graphics that match that style.

whaa why is it gone?

Sorry that my comment is just critical. You should not add a shadow to your graphics, because shadows need to be processed differently. For 2D Graphics, shadows can simply be made in the engine by removing all colors from the image.

Also different colors of the same assets are not that useful, because it's easy to colorize grey assets into any color. Written menu buttons are also not that useful, just imagine the game creator wants to have another button. Here it's better to hand out a font, and an empty button, and the programmer can have buttons with any text.

Try to make your graphics as abstract as possible, so it can be used in many situations.

Yes I know we already have a list of graphic programs in the development thread, but it is old, doesn't look like anybody updates it and it only cares about whether the tool works on windows. Here is my list of tools that work perfectly fine on linux and are perfectly suitable for graphic artists.

krita (fork of gimp focusing on the drawing part)
mypaint (border free drawing )
GrafX2 (retro program for retro pixel art  )
gimp (these layers   )
inkscape (vector graphics, not super simple)

Hello people

I am looking for tools that make it easy, and especially fast to create graphics for 2D games. I do really not care for beauty, but I would like to have the output at least in a uniform style. So not pixel art mixed with rendered objects. The focus is on getting usable graphics fast. The tool doesn't need to be general, I just need to be able to process the graphics in my game. A very important thing, the tool should be for very untalented people. So tools where you have to draw are out of business.

Something with a pipeline like this would be perfect:

• Select a source photo/image
• do some semi automated object extraction
• Select a bunch of filters
• define the output format and size
• profit

I do like the concept, but I have to agree, that the graphic style needs to be worked on. Even though the game uses 3d rendered sprites, everything looks flat. The background layers look like they are really far away, and there is a deep canyon between the player layer and the backgrounds.

To the diamonds in the last gif. As a player I want some instant feedback, when I collect something. In Mario you have the instant coin "bling" that instantly tells you that you got them. here the information is delayed for some reason. That's something that feels not cool and not appropriate to a viking game. As a viking you want somthing that is instant. Some base effect and "BAM" you've got diamonds. Not something that is "......shhhhh...hah..". If you know what I mean.

I don't get the Rammstein Joke. It's an obvious reference to "du hast", but it's just nonsense. Random keywords. The most interesting part of "du hast" is, that with every word that is added to the sentence, the meaning of the entire sentence changes. Here there is no meaning all the time.

I wanna have this game. Why? Because I expect something like Terraria, but with more style and less grinding. Your screenshots give so much room for

.

On this topic everybody has it's own guidelines. Mine is, don't use raw pointer at all, if you can avoid it. Use references where it is possible. If you need pointers, use the smart ones (eg. std::unique_ptr). And don't use any operators like + ++ - -- [] on pointers. if you want to iterate, use range based for, if you need to access an array, use std::vector instead. Sometimes there is no way around pointers, but not very often.